• EXOSPHERE

Teresa wished she could help Alex. But all her skills were useless in this battle, a conflict as intricate as a No play, fought with the deadly delicacy of weaving, bobbing Siamese fish.

At least she could help watch the prisoner, freeing some security boys to stand guard against saboteurs. And she’d see to keeping Pedro out of Alex’s hair.

Fortunately, those two jobs coincided as the big Aztlan reporter eagerly questioned June Morgan. He forced her to look toward the holo display, where each thrust and parry translated into more deaths, more local catastrophes. “It wasn’t supposed to go this far,” the blonde traitor answered miserably. “They never intended all-out war.”

“They hardly ever do,” Manella commented. “Big, destructive hostilities nearly always used to come about when one side thought it knew just how the other would react to a show of force, and miscalculated their opponents’ resolve.”

Teresa watched June wince as roiling changes lit up the many-layered Earth. Nearby, Alex Lustig tapped rapid commands with a keypad-glove, adding muttered amendments quicker than speech with his subvocal device. Others hurried about their tasks with similar crisp efficiency … the only trait that might help the last Tangoparu team in its desperate, one-sided struggle to survive.

“It’s all my fault,” June said with a despairing sigh. “If I’d only done my job, they wouldn’t have had their bluff called. Not yet, at least. Now, though, all their plans are messed up. They’re in a panic. Far more dangerous than if they’d won.”

The patent rationalization made Teresa want to spit. “You still haven’t said who they are!”

Earlier June had refused to answer, as if the direct question terrified her. Now she seemed to decide it didn’t matter anymore.

“It’s kind of hard to explain.”

“Try us,” Manella urged.

With a sigh, June regarded them both. “Pedro, Teresa, haven’t either of you ever wondered? I mean, why do people assume the Helvetian War put an end to the world’s oldest profession?”

Teresa blinked. “Are you being snide?”

June laughed without mirth. “I don’t mean prostitution, Terry. I’m talking about parasites, manipulators who thrive on secrecy. There have always been schemers and plotters—since before Gilgamesh and the pyramids.

“Come on, you two. Who do you think poisoned Roosevelt and had the Kennedys shot? Or arranged for Simyonev’s plane to crash? What about Lamberton and Tsushima? Are you sure those were accidents? Didn’t they work out rather conveniently for those profiting in the aftermath?

“Teresa and I are too young, but Pedro, you remember how things were during the weeks before the Brazzaville Declaration, don’t you? Back when delegations started flying in spontaneously from all over the world to declare the antisecrecy alliance? How many people died of mysterious accidents before the delegates overcame all the obstacles and ideological distractions and at last built a momentum that was unstoppable? Then how many world leaders had to be deposed before the masses had their way and the Alps were finally put under siege?”

“Half the presidents and ministers had secret bank accounts to protect,” Pedro replied. “So naturally they tried to obstruct. But in the end they failed—”

“They didn’t fail. They were used. Used up in delaying actions.” June’s eyebrows lowered. “Why do you think the war lasted so damn long, hmm? The Swiss people sure didn’t want to take on the whole damn planet! They never imagined all those generations spent digging tunnels and bomb shelters had a purpose beyond mere deterrence.

“And even when it ended at last, you don’t actually think the bank records that U.N. forces finally dug out of the rubble were the real ones, do you?”

Manella shook his head. “Are you implying whole levels of conspirators we missed? That all the drug lords and bribe takers and commissar billionaires we caught—”

“Were just expendable flunkies, thrown down to appease the mob. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying, Mr. Reporter.” June’s voice was bitter. “The real manipulators wanted Helvetia completely destroyed. The war had to cost so many lives, so an exhausted world would exult in victory and desperately want to believe it was over.”

“This is ridiculous,” Teresa told Pedro. “She’s sounding like a bad Lovecraft novel now. What’s next, June? Dark Unspeakable Unnameable Horrors from Before the Start of Time? Or how about something out of those wonderful, paranoid Illuminati books? Who are your bosses, then? Freemasons? The Trilateral Commission? Jesuits? The Elders of Zion?” Teresa laughed. “How about Fu Manchu or the Comintern…?”

June shrugged. “Those were useful distractions in their day—glitter and window dressing designed to attract fools, so conspiracy theories in general would get a bad odor with normal, honest folk.”

To her dismay, Teresa found herself drawn by June Morgan’s frankness. The woman clearly believed what she was saying. And she’s right in a way, Teresa thought, suddenly aware of her own reaction. Look at me now. Refusing to believe, even as proof tears the world down around me

Pedro chewed one end of his moustache. “You aren’t referring to the aliens are you? The makers of Beta? Are they your—”

June looked up quickly. “Oh heavens no!” She gestured at the big display. “Do the assholes who sent me here seem that competent to you? Look how badly they screwed up their attempted coup. Would Beta’s makers have let Alex jerk them around like he has?”

As they all looked that way, a trio of yellow rays caused Beta’s purple dot to throb with incipient power, but once again they were foiled by a slender rapier from Easter Island, sending their pent-up force spiraling off uselessly in some other direction.

June shook her head. “No, humanity is able to breed predators all on its own, Pedro. Talented parasites with lots of experience tapping the innovations of others. You don’t need much brains for that, just certain manipulative talents and lots of arrogance.”

“The illusion of omniscience,” Pedro said, nodding.

“Oh yes. I’ve seen them, gathered in their halls with all their money, giving each other circle-jerks—telling each other how smart they are just because thirty years ago they managed to preserve some of their old power, because people were too tired and relieved at war’s end to peel back the last layer.

“Only now, at last, they know how stupid they really were all along. You got it right, Pedro. They miscalculated this latest move and are going to die soon. For that part at least, I’m truly grateful.”

The admission took Teresa aback. All this time she had assumed June was acting out of loyalty to some group or cause. Clearly the woman feared her veiled masters, but now Teresa saw how much she also loathed them.

Glancing at the great display, Teresa intuited what June meant. All over the world, in national capitals and command posts and even hackers’ parlors, there were other Earth-holos like this one. Perhaps cruder, but growing better by the minute. Especially now that Glenn Spivey’s group and others were spilling all they knew in sudden, panic-driven spasms of openness. On every one of those displays, the enemy resonator sites must shine like angry pirates’ emblems … standing out for the simple reason that no one claimed ownership over them. That lack of candor in these hot, tense hours was an indictment worse than any smoking gun.

Right now every security alliance, peacekeeping force and local militia with the means was probably sending units toward those mystery sites. Their weaponry might be paltry compared to TwenCen arms—their unpracticed reflexes might be slow—but those soldiers would certainly make short work of June’s employers when they arrived.

No, her bosses can’t have planned for this. They must have counted on taking the Tangoparu tetrahedron completely by surprise, wiping out the original four and all the newer resonators with sabotage or gazer strikes. Then, in sole possession of the ultimate terror weapon, they could hold the world hostage. They came damn close to succeeding.

But even as she saw the logic, Teresa had to shake her head.

In which case … so what? It’s an insane plan even if it worked! They couldn’t have gotten away with it for long. The result would have been just too unstable.

Teresa saw that a lull had fallen since Alex’s last successful parry. He was sipping through a straw from a glass held by one of the cooks. She wanted to go over and rub his shoulders and maybe whisper some encouragement, but she also knew Alex too well for that. Those shoulders were Atlas’s right now. And a lot more than the lives in this room rode on his train of thought. It mustn’t be interrupted.

“You’re describing an act of sheer desperation,” Pedro surmised, still talking to June. “These conspirators of yours … even in victory, they couldn’t hope to hold onto what they’d won!”

June answered with a tired shrug. “What did they have to lose? The status quo was deteriorating from their point of view. Everything they had rescued from the ashes of Helvetia was slipping through their hands like smoke.”

“I don’t get it. What threatened them?”

June motioned toward the consoles, toward Teresa’s data plaque, toward the phone on Pedro’s belt. “The net,” she said succinctly.

“The net?”

“That’s right. It was getting to big, too open and all-pervading … too bloody democratic to manipulate much longer. They were growing more desperate every year. Then this gravity amplification business came along—”

“—which you leaked to them!” Teresa accused.

June nodded. “They had other sources. As you’ve said so often, it’s awful hard to keep secrets these days … that is, unless you own the system.”

“Own the net?” Teresa sniffed incredulously. “Nobody owns the net.”

“Well, bits of it. Special, strategic pieces. Think about when the original fiber cables and data hubs were laid. Someone could always be bought out, bribed, blackmailed. Computer nodes were designed with ‘back door’ entry codes, known only to a few …”

“Why? To what end?”

June laughed. “To always be first hearing about the latest technical advance! So your ferrets will get that split second priority advantage, letting you cache away items before others see them. To manipulate the mail—”

“Preposterous!” Teresa objected. “People would notice!”

June nodded. “Oh, now we know that. But then? The net was supposed to be their baby. Their tool! It would replace big banks as an instrument of control, above nations and governments. Above even money.

“After all, didn’t old sci-fi stories picture it that way? ‘He who controls the flow of information controls the world’? That was to be their answer to Brazzaville and Rio.” June’s voice stung with biting irony. “Only it didn’t quite work out that way. Instead of being their tame instrument, the Net kept slipping free like something alive. So they—”

“They, they!” Pedro smacked a fist into his palm, making Teresa wince. The man should remember where they were.

“Who are they?” Manella demanded. “Who the hell are you talking about, woman!”

Another shrug. “Do names matter? Picture all the powerful cabals of egotists cluttering the world at the turn of the century. Call them old or new money … or red cadres … or dukes and lordships. Historians know they all spent more time conniving with each other than waging their supposedly high-minded ideological struggles.

“The smart ones saw Brazzaville coming and prepared. They saw to it that all the reasonable Helvetian and Cayman ministers were assassinated or drugged and that every attempt at compromise, even surrender, was rejected.”

That rocked Pedro back. “Do you mean…?” But June hurried on.

“Actually, do you want to know what their worst problem was? It’s afflicted them since early TwenCen—a worse threat to power elites than mass education, news media, even the personal computer. It was defection.”

“Defection?” Teresa asked, captivated despite herself.

“Each successive generation found it harder to hold onto its own children! World culture was so enticing, even to rich kids with the chance to live like rajahs. The best and brightest were always being tempted away into so-called bourgeois careers—in the arts or sciences—because those are intrinsically more interesting than sitting around clipping coupons and bullying the servants—”

“Wait a minute!” Teresa interrupted. “How do you know all this?” Then she saw something in the other woman’s eyes. “Oh—”

Teresa felt a sudden, unwelcome wash of empathy for June Morgan. The blonde geophysicist smiled wryly. “Family ties, you see. Our little branch made its break when Dad ran off to play music and do fund-raisers for wildlife. Naturally, the cousins cut us off from information, though we never lacked for money.

“Anyway, Dad didn’t want to know about their schemes. He called my uncles ‘dinosaurs.’ Said their way of thinking would die out naturally.” June snorted. “Ever hear how the dinosaurs died though? I wouldn’t want to be underfoot when it happened.”

“So you figured on playing along. Let them have their way—”

“—till they dried up and blew away. Yeah, that was part of it. That and—” June looked down. “Well, they can be persuasive. You don’t know them.”

But Teresa figured she really did. If not as individuals, then the type—one needing stronger tonics than satisfied ordinary men and women. Their inner hunger seemed to crave money and power, but was, in fact, insatiable by anything this side of death.

Anyway, details hardly mattered. June’s dinosaur analogy matched the geological scale of the drama portrayed on the great display. Teresa could read some of those livid trails of human meddling. So many ghostly phenomena were taking place far beneath her feet, whose repercussions would reverberate long after the last blows were struck.

One recent consequence of battle was clear. Nearly every excited energy state under Easter Island was depleted from hours of ceaseless stimulation. All the filaments and prominences and delicate webs of electricity now glowed dull red and wouldn’t serve as gazer sources again until their former blue intensity returned. That could take anywhere from minutes to hours. Meanwhile, it was hard to see how the enemy could strike at them here.

As she watched, Alex’s final beam lanced along the core’s fiery rim to catch a distant bright thread in a carom off Beta’s glittering mirror. One of the enemy probes quavered and then toppled off scale. That resonator would take some time recovering, she knew.

Meanwhile, the world was converging on the bastards. How long until the clumsy, unready, uncoordinated U.N. posse finally got to them? Alex has won the advantage back. Time’s running out for the enemy. So what’ll they do now?

An answer wasn’t long in coming.

“The other two are firing up again,” the watch officer announced.

A technician protested. “But they can’t reach us past that dead zone for at least—”

“They’re not aiming at us!” The first voice answered. “Look!”

Teresa blinked as the Saharan and Japan Sea sites sent new beams to tickle the planet’s core. Beta answered with glowing counterpoints, now completely out of reach by Alex and his crew. The Tangoparu team watched, helpless to interfere.

Beta throbbed. Nearby tendrils coiled with pent-up energy. Then something actinic and mighty flashed, striking like a fist toward the heart of a great land mass.

North America.

“They’re talking!” The communications operator announced. “Blanketing all channels … it’s an ultimatum. They’re saying all national forces must back off within two minutes or.… ”

The young woman didn’t have to finish. A continent was visibly ringing like a hammered girder, the object lesson apparent to all.

Silence reigned. Finally Teresa asked, “What now?”

For the first time, Alex looked up from his console. Tiredly, he pulled off the subvocal, leaving red streaks where the instrument had rubbed him raw. He met her eyes. “I don’t know, Rip. I guess it depends on what they’re trying to accomplish.”

All eyes turned to the comm operator, whose specialty it was to sieve the noisy airwaves. A myriad of rapid images flickered across the woman’s face. As she pieced together the story, she slowly smiled in realization.

“That last punch was a negotiating move,” she said. “But what they say they really want is … to surrender!”

All over the room, tired workers slumped in their chairs with sighs of relief. Someone let out a whoop and threw open the double doors, letting in a fresh breeze that drove before it the stale tang of fear.

Teresa and Alex met each others’ eyes, each seeking reassurance there, and reason to accept hope.

A woman sits alone in a locked room.

She is a mighty enchantress. And though alone, she is not without company. For there are her familiars to fetch and carry for her. And a pair of heroes on the wall, chained there for her amusement.

They are Hercules and Samson, caught together in a loop of frozen time, rattling their clinking bonds as they face a mighty hydra. They have played out the same silent struggle—straining and grunting defiantly, repetitively—ever since the enchantress put them there to be “enhanced,” many days ago.

Now, though, she has little time for such things. The heroes must wait their turn.

“Oh no you don’t,” the woman croons as she watches more important images array themselves across another magic wall. The world’s simulacrum sparkles like an electric onion, seething with changes deep within. It is an impressive show, but she cares little about those lower layers. Only the brown and green and blue wrinkled outer skin, which she finds diseased, infested with a plague of greedy parasites.

Ten billion parasites called human beings.

She knows little and cares less about the inner onion. But about the skin she has studied much and cares more. She has bound herself to an oath, a quest—to the saving of that skin. To the culling of those parasites.

“Oh no, I won’t let you do that,” she says to those who thought they were her patrons, her cousins, her masters, but who are in fact, her instruments. Desperate now, they threaten, bluster, scrabbling in panic as they seek a way to save their useless lives.

Petty lives, cheap to her, since their kind are far too numerous anyway. They suffer illusions of their own importance, just because they are among the “richest” of a race of fleas. Their latest plan is the best they can hope for now … bartering millions of lives against a promise of amnesty. Already the Net fills with tentative offers. Relief swells over yet another catastrophe barely averted. But she has other things in mind.

“No, it isn’t over yet,” she says, humming sweetly as she works. An armistice would hardly serve her purposes. It must be replaced with something else. Rubbing knurled knobs, she summons forth her servants, her familiars—simpler, more obedient versions of the fearsome lizard she had once crafted and then somehow lost. These are new variants, streamlined and single-minded. They streak forth at her command, wisps of electron energy under geas to lay scourge upon the kingdom of fleas.

The first clue to this great opportunity had come from her own ex-mate, a compromiser she had once loved. His work for the military had opened this new world to her. When her cousins began financing her investigations with bottomless coffers, she suddenly had access to the very best tools—both software and hardware. Day in, day out, her little spies brought back more clues.

At first she rode along, watching as her foolish relations played with powers beyond their understanding. But as time passed, she began realizing what power they had overlooked … what lay there amidst the mountains of data, ripe for the taking. Why, it was the very sword of cleansing!

Even as the world’s nations draw back from confrontation, the enchantress uses private trails and secret byways to send her emissaries toward places far away. “You aren’t going to stop there,” she says. “Oh, no. Now is not the time to stop.”

The room suddenly shakes and sways for the fifth time in as many minutes, but this does not interrupt her. They are only aftershocks from silly earthquakes. Anyway, the house is well built, with its own ample power.

From a town called White Castle, one might faintly hear sirens wailing. But that is in the world of men and machines, and therefore as much a useless metaphor as poor, straining, sweating Hercules on the wall, damp with rivers of simulated sweat. It is in the world of electrons and hidden forces that all will be decided. And that world belongs to Daisy.

“Go ahead. Make it rattle and roll,” the enchantress says. “Enjoy your toys. But in the end, it all comes down to flesh.”